I. INTRODUCTION
Alright, here we go. This here guide will attempt to explain what enchanting and enhancing are, how to go about doing them, and the advantages and disadvantages of one method over the other. It’ll examine both options from a cost-effectiveness standpoint as well as a simple probability standpoint.

II. ENCHANTING – what is it, and why should I care?
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve played Atlantica a little bit. Good for you. Good game, isn’t it? :P

Anyways, because you’ve played Atlantica, you probably already know exactly what enchanting is, since a very early quest involves enchanting an item, and you probably already know everything I’m about to type and are wondering to yourself when the guide gets interesting. Well, skip ahead if it bores you, ya know-it-all.

Enchanting is a method for increasing the strength of your equipment that works all the time, every time. Essentially, to enchant something, you need two identical pieces of equipment (be they armor, weapons, or accessories) and the proper enchant stone (an armor, weapon, or accessory enchant stone of the proper grade). The number of stones required varies depending on the enchantment of the items used in the process; the formula for determining this is

x + 1 = stones

where x is the enchantment value (the number next to the +) of either item involved.

Once you have obtained these materials, you can start enchanting. One of the good things about enchanting is that it can be done anywhere in the world. To access the enchanting menu, click the enchant button, located in My Info > Enchant

The enchant menu shows up, containing three empty slots as well as the inventory of your currently selected mercenary.

To begin the process of enchanting, you can either place the item to be enchanted into the “Item to enchant” slot (imagine that!) or you can click the “auto” button (do this instead, it’s much more convenient) and then click the enchant button. If you keep clicking the auto button, it will cycle through any available items you can enchant, by the way. Very handy trick.

Now, just wait a bit, and…

Ta-dah! A +1 spirit rifle!
Now, if we took two +1 spirit rifles and enchanted them together, we’d get a +2, although keep in mind this requires two “weapon enchant stone [beg]” instead of one, as per the previous formula.

Now, as you might have guessed, the [beg] enchant stones won’t work on all items, dear reader! Alas, [beg] stones only work on items up to level 30 (that is, items with a level requirement of 30 or below). [int] stones are needed for the next tier of items, and those are effective up through level 60. [adv] stones are currently the highest level stones in-game, and can be used on all items up through level 100.

There’s also a very, very miniscule chance that your weapon will gain more than 1 in its grade when you enchant it; the luckiest of these (as in +0 to +7!) are announced server-wide.

That about covers that topic. Now onto something you ALSO already knew!

III. Okay, but what’s this ENHANCING business all about, anyhow?

“Well,” you might say to yourself one day, “Enchanting’s nice, and all, but I don’t like the predictability. Two items enter, one item leaves, and I’m less the money for stones, every time. Blah, blah, blah. Day in, and day out. I’m sick of it. I want some adventure. I’m a gambler, and I want to put it all on the line for top of the line equipment. Where can I find something like that in this game?” Well, my friend, enhancing is exactly the answer you’re looking for!

Basically, enhancing is much like upgrading weapons and armor in other MMOs you may be familiar with (Ragnarok Online comes to mind). Instead of using two identical pieces of equipment, you use one piece of equipment, and instead of ENCHANT stones you use ENHANCE stones! (gasp!) Sounds great, don’t it?

Well, there’s a catch. There’s only a certain chance it’ll work.

And if it doesn’t work, you lose the item. Forever.

As in, gone.
For good.

And, as if to kick you in the face even more, you still lose the stones, too.

AND NOW, A HOW-TO:

First, you have to go to the bazaar of rome. You can either walk there (haha) or you can teleport there using the menu on the right side of your screen. (This option is available only after level 20, and it takes a buncha will to do it.)

Once there…

…turn around…

…and walk forward until you see this guy.

Besides having one of the badassest names in the entire game, Vulcanus is also the only person in the game who can enhance your stuff. This is one of the downfalls of enhancing; you have to go to this guy, and this guy alone, to do it.

Talk to him, and this menu pops up.

It functions almost identically to the enchanting menu; either click auto, and the stones and item will be placed automagically, or click the item to enhance and move it to the empty slot yourself. When this is done, click enhance, say a prayer to your deity of choice (I reccommend Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck), and wait the unbearable five seconds or so for the bar to fill up. If you’re lucky…

…this’ll happen, and your weapon will get +1 to its grade. I think there’s also a tiny, tiny chance that it’ll get more than +1, like enchanting, although I can’t personally recall this happenning to me. Could someone confirm this for me?

If you’re unlucky…

…this’ll happen, and the item and stones will be reduced to nothing but a memory. Don’t worry, though, it happens to the best of us, and you’ve just got to pick your feet up and try again, among other cliches.

III a. My personal strategy for enhancing
My strategy is simple. Always have at least two of the item you’re trying to enhance, and never try to enhance the highest-graded one. For example, if I want to enhance a destroyer’s spear, I would first get two of them, and I would then proceed to enhance all of them, one by one, making sure not to enhance the highest-graded one, until all but one broke or I had a +10. I would then keep the other. This way, I always end up with SOMETHING from my exploits, instead of risking both spears and losing them.

Here’s a (purely theoretical) example of this strategy in action. After each line I try enhancing the spears one level higher, from left to right.

Starting with 3 destroyer’s spears:
+0 +0 +0
+1 +1 +1 (I got lucky, and all of them were successful)
+2 +2 +2 (again I was lucky and all three of them were enhanced)
x +3 +3 (one of them broke, but I continue enhancing the other two)
– x (the other has broken, and I cease enhancing at this point)

This isn’t really better or worse than other methods. This is just the one I use, because it always leaves me with SOMETHING, even if it isn’t much.

IV. Alright, I think I get it. Now, tell me: WHICH IS BETTER?
Well, this is a tricky subject. At the end of the day, it’s very dependant on the market you’re operating in: the price of the item and the price of each of the stones is very important in factoring which is more cost-effective.

Now, assuming that the helpfile on enhancing is not lying when it says “Enhancing an item will be successful more than 50% of them [sic] time”, then enhancing will statistically be far better for you. Why? Well, let’s look at raw numbers. Assuming we start with +0 items, and that the probability of enhance working is 55% (I figure this is a reasonable assumption), here are the number of items we’d need, using each method, to get to a certain grade:

The formula used to calculate the number of items needed for enhancements is (1/n)^g, where n is the probability of success (in this case .55) and g is the grade of the item.

Looking at the chart, you can see the difference is astounding. At lower levels the difference in items needed is not too significant; 6 vs. 8 at +3 does not seem like that much, in terms of +0 items. However, the difference becomes far more pronounced as the grade of the item we’re trying to get increases, up to +10, where there is a staggering difference of 629 pieces of equipment used in the process! Statistically speaking, you are clearly much better off enhancing your items.

But statistical probability isn’t the only thing we can consider in this game. All materials involved cost money, and armor and weapon enchant stones are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than their enhance stone equivalent, at [beg], [int], and [adv]. As far as stone cost is concerned, enchanting is therefore the better bet, because at lower levels the enhance stones would usually cost more than the items themselves. Essentially, while low-level and dealing with lower-leveled weapons and armor, you are better off enchanting your items.

However, when dealing with accessories and higher-leveled equipment, the item cost FAR outweighs the enhance stone cost. In this case, the opposite is true; because enhancing uses far less items, on average, than enchanting does, you are much better off enhancing your items to increase your mercs’ power.

And that, essentially, is the essence of enhancing vs. enchanting, and this is the tl;dr of that gigantic wall of text you just (maybe) read:

IF THE ITEMS COST AN ASSTON, ENHANCE THEM.

IF THE ITEMS ARE A DIME A DOZEN, ENCHANT THEM.

V. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my keyboard, for being typed on without complaint.

I would like to thank the printscreen button, for working flawlessly whenever called upon.

I would like to thank my mouse, for allowing me to click things with extreme prejudice.

I would like to thank MSPaint, for putting completely ridiculous jpeg artifacts on all my images. Thanks a bunch!